Long-lost Palin surfaces in emails

She was hands-on and averse to partisan politics. She championed openness in government and had normal relations with the media. She was a little starstruck by her interactions with national politicians but unafraid to do battle with the chief executives of the world’s largest oil companies.

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The emails from her governorship, released Friday, brought back the memory of a long-lost Palin: the popular, charismatic, competent woman of the people.

This was the vice presidential candidate John McCain’s team thought they were getting, before her darker tendencies — defensiveness, thin skin, grudge-keeping — hardened into tics. Together with the newly released, pro-Palin documentary “The Undefeated,” which focuses on her rise to the spotlight, the emails are reminders of a sympathetic figure who was not yet the brittle, divisive caricature Palin has become.

The Palin that emerges from the first cut at nearly 25,000 emails released by the state of Alaska Friday is touchingly authentic, responding to the news she’s been tapped for the national ticket with the words, “Can you flippinbelieveit?!”

She comes across as practical and not doctrinaire, as when she explains at length to an aide, early in her term, why she opposes a bear hunt in a wildlife preserve: “I am a hunter. I grew up hunting — some of my best memories growing up are of hunting with my dad to help feel (sic) our freezer… I want Alaskans to have access to wildlife… BUT — he’s asking if I support hunting the bears in the sanctuary? No, I don’ t … Many Alaskan and Outside visitors view these animals on the McNeil river, within the sanctuary, and, as my parents have reported back after their viewing trip, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience to see such beauty on that river.”

Far from being a knee-jerk partisan, she praises then-Sen. Barack Obama for his energy ideas — “pretty cool,” even though he is the “wrong candidate.” She derides the Republican establishment just weeks before being picked for the ticket, writing, “we need to remember the GOP, for the most part … especially the AK machine … has not had any support or assistance provided our administration so our time and efforts will continue to be spent on serving Alaskans, not party politics.”

If critics were hoping to see Palin revealed as a hypocrite, they’re out of luck. Her private statements are in line with her public ones when it comes to issues like Troopergate, the ethics scandal in which she was accused of abusing her authority to punish her sister’s ex-husband. Her emails on the matter fulminate against what she insists are false accusations, maintaining the same consistent defense — that Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan was fired for performance, not personal, reasons.

Palin comes across as neither an airhead nor a prima donna. She is warm and supportive with her staff, who are loyal to her in turn. She frequently misspells in haste or phonetically (“nonsensicle” for “nonsensical”), but her writing is fluent and grammatical.

Nor is she a figurehead. She is active in guiding policy, a self-assured politician who knows where she stands. When she feels she’s been left out of the loop on responding to a disaster, she’s adamant — “someone from Homeland Security/Emergency Management needs to call me and inform me on things like this … I insist on being informed during any situation where the public would feel any person could be in danger.”